... this story should be a big deal. Romney may very well be the next president. That’s a position of some responsibility. Yet he and his campaign rushed to tell voters a story designed to stoke their fears for their livelihoods without bothering to vet it for basic accuracy. This is not a small thing. It reveals the depth of Romney’s blithe lack of concern for the truth — and the subservience of it to his own political ambitions.

Speaking on CNN, Romney campaign co-chair and renowned bloviator John Sununu had the following exchange with host Piers Morgan:

“When you take a look at Colin Powell, you have to wonder whether that’s an endorsement based on issues or whether he’s got a slightly different reason for preferring President Obama,” Mr. Sununu said.

Mr. Morgan asked flatly, “What reason would that be?”

Mr. Sununu responded, “Well, I think when you have somebody of your own race that you’re proud of being president of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him.”

According to Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com and Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium, President Obama has and has maintained a small lead in battleground states that translates into an electoral college win. Right-leaning RealClearPolitics shows the electoral college map closer, but only because it puts states like Pennsylvania in the toss-up column, where their own data shows Obama up by about 5%. So, as Jonathan Chait points out in New York Magazine when Romney says he's winning, it's a bluff.

Writing in the Washington Post, historian Robert S. McElvaine, author of The Great Depression: America 1929-1941 observes:

Historically, a Democrat without business experience has been extraordinarily better for the economy and the stock market than a Republican who had a career in business. In the past 84 years, GDP has grown 7 percent per year under Democrats without business experience (FDR, JFK, LBJ, Clinton and Obama) and fallen by 0.2 percent per year under Republicans with business experience (Hoover and the two Bushes). The Dow has risen an average of 16.8 percent per year under Democrats without business experience and has fallen by 3.7 percent per year under Republicans with business experience.

Lost in the media obsession with what their children's-book narrative of the day is, and the reality-TV-like mania surrounding the "debates," are two critical realities, highlighted recently by New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait, and the Washington Post's Katrina van den Heuvel, formerly editor of The Nation

Of the six studies, two are blog posts by the conservative American Enterprise Institute; one is a report by the Republican-friendly Heritage Foundation; one is a paper by Princeton professor and former George W. Bush adviser Harvey Rosen; the fifth and sixth are a Wall Street Journal op-ed and blog post by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, an adviser to the Romney campaign.